Kagemusha
April 2, 2005
Kurosawa loved Shakespeare. Maybe it was the words, maybe it was the inherent sense of conflict, maybe it was the familial connotations of the plots, or maybe it was the truly cinematic visuals of his staging, but this greatest of all directors took to the Bard unlike any other filmmaker this side of Orson Welles. By 1979, the master had already filmed variations of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, and had a long dreamed of adaptation of “King Lear” ready to go, but following a turbulent decade worthy of any Shakespearian tragedy, Kurosawa couldn’t find money to make the dream materialize. So, instead he set his mind to “Kagemusha”, and the 16th Century feudal period of the Takeda clan, who, if you dissect them down the line, resemble not only a Shakespearian family waiting for ruin, but features a protagonist one step below Lear, not quite mad, but destroyed by the illusion of power and betrayal.
Funding, in the fickle movie business, even for the best director of all time, can be a Herculean task to obtain, and much like his ‘Lear’ project, Kurosawa found “Kagemusha” caught in no-man’s-land, development hell as it’s known in the biz, so he took the idea to his brush and easel, painted over 200 beautifully colorful storyboards, and left the project to fate. Fate came in the form of a few powerful fans, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, two Hollywood heavies who secured a loan from 20th Century Fox to fund and distribute the expensive period epic, and with only a few heavily publicized glitches, Akira Kurosawa made his best non-Shakespeare Shakespearian tragedy, and secured himself, after ten years of misery, as the grand old father of world cinema. The success would lead, like success should lead, to that long shelved dream, five years later, of “King Lear”, made into the visual masterpiece “Ran”, realizing yet again that Shakespeare’s themes, transposed to the realm of the jidai-geki makes for a splendid dance of visual costume drama and personal tragedy.
“Kagemusha”, winner of the Palme D’or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, and just released by The Criterion Collection on a deluxe 2-disk Special Edition DVD, is not Shakespeare, and it is not historical fact, but uses legend, both known and speculated, to weave a Shakespearian tale concurrent with much of the director’s earlier themes, namely, that of illusionary power, and the struggle between the protégé (son), and his mentor (father). Set in 1573, during the Sengoku Jidai period, usually known as the Warring Clans period, “Kagemusha”- literally, shadow, or double- centers on the mighty Takeda clan, who are only a few moves away from Kyoto, and total rule of Japan. Warlord Shingen (Tatsuya Nakadai) is the kind of figurehead that men would die for, but his brilliant strategy is pacifist, “immovable as a mountain” is one of his motto’s, much to the dismay of his looked-over son, Katsuyori (Kenichi Hagiwara), and the two rival clan lords, Nobunaga Oda (Daisuke Ryu), and Ieyasu Tokugawa (Masayuki Yui), who are waiting for the old man to make a move away from his impenetrable castle. One night, to hear a flute player echoing in the night, he does just that, and is promptly shot by a sniper, setting in motion a three-year game of cat-and-mouse between the Takeda clan and rival spies as to whether Shingen was really killed, leaving the Takeda’s vulnerable for a coup.
Legend has it that Shingen may have been killed by that sniper, but one of the best aspects to a master director like Kurosawa working with myths in a jidai-geki (period film), is that while he can meticulously recreate aesthetics in color, costume, and design, story is flexible, and his masterstroke comes in the form of a doppelganger, a look-alike who is called upon after being caught stealing, to impersonate the Lord for three years, if and when he finally dies. The double (also played by Nakadai, in one of the all-time great performances), whose name we never learn, is obviously a lower specimen as compared to the revered Shingen, and when we first meet him, in the films remarkably staged solitary seven-minute long opening shot, he is about to be crucified for stealing when Shingen pardons him; maybe he’ll be useful down the line is the thinking. A deal is later struck, in exchange for his freedom, the shadow will resume Shingen’s duties for three years after his death, just enough time to set the Takeda clan up for the Japanese power grab. When it finally happens, and Shingen is killed, the petty thief has doubts- “I can play this role of double from time to time,” he says, “but not day and night. It’s too much.” Complications abound ethically as well, for who says a man’s body can be replaced without his soul having something to say about it, which it does, in one of the films surrealist dreamscapes. And for that matter, the man’s rightful heir, who already had a rocky relationship with the Lord, finds it impossible to bow to a meager double. The major idea formulates itself around act three, when we realize that a farce, perpetrated in a time of war, to preserve the existence of a ruthless, yet beloved being, is destined to fail, no matter how much the generals, and the double want it to succeed.
“Kagemusha” can be lumped in with Kurosawa’s earlier Shakespearian masterpiece “Throne of Blood”, and the later “Ran”, even though it was an original idea, simply because thematically and aesthetically it is similar. Much like Shakespeare’s tragedies, the central theme in the film is power; what it does to the mind, and how obtaining it can destroy one’s body and soul. In “Kagemusha”, the double never asks for the power, but it is forced upon him, and adapting to the life, he begins to love the Lord’s grandson like his own, unlike Shingen’s ignorance of his real son, Katsuyori. When he finally relishes in the power, much like the Macbeth surrogate in “Throne of Blood”, he is disposed and brought back to his original lower class status, relegated to the sidelines while Katsuyori destroys what is left of his father’s clan at the battle of Nagashino, where Kurosawa famously symbolizes the futility of war in the staggering image of stumbling horses in slow motion. If the Takeda clan resembles the downfall of Macbeth, and the double’s lost love for his post resembles Lear’s ever-loosening grip on sanity, than it also must be noted that the theme of fathers and sons, mentor and protégé, is not only Shakespearian, but wholly of the cinema of Akira Kurosawa. You can trace a line through the years, from the non-samurai masterpieces “Drunken Angel”, “Stray Dog”, and in a bureaucratic sense, “Ikiru”, to the classic communal example of “Seven Samurai”, where the notion of the heroic Big Brother is written all over Takashi Shimura’s face as he protects the weaker peasants from bandits and devastation. In “Kagemusha”, the father overlooks the son, and the double inherits the father’s cold head-of-family position, giving it some warmth and humor, which in turn is spit on, and eventually brought to disaster by ignorance, ego, and the son’s strained familial relations with his late father. Shakespeare had the Rose Theater and English morality, Kurosawa had the hills of Japan, horses, and the feuds of Japanese lore, but really, there is little, if any, difference between the two masters, separated by centuries, but brothers in dramatic confliction.
“Kagemusha” was a big coup for Kurosawa in 1980, after a decade of depression, an attempted suicide, and cinematic failure in his home country. Not only did it state that, at 74, the old master still had what it takes to piece together a tragedy of epic proportions with beautiful design and imagination (after weaker color efforts like “Dodes’ka-den” and “Dersu Uzala”), but added a new dynamic to his already legendary mixture of intense visuals and carefully choreographed sound patterns- a painter’s eye for color. The explosion would fully realize itself five years later in “Ran”, but here Kurosawa brings his storyboards to life with striking compositions and disarming color palates. In one breathtaking sequences, a drab interior window opens up into a white snowy field, then immediately is cut to a marvelously dusty yellow sunset, where troops are mobilizing for battle, before cutting one more time to a stark red sky over contrasting gray clouds. Kurosawa’s eye for nature’s color is omnipresent, as is his obvious set backgrounds, often awash in simple candlelight or gloriously bold purple, segmenting the room by power class- the Lord in pure light, with dark shadows, while the common followers sit in the purple foreground, as if they don’t deserve the warming effect of a nice candle’s glow. The color designs, as well as Kurosawa’s usual brilliant sense of movement within the frame (the famous second scene, following a messenger cascading down the castle’s stairs, past four different samurai regimens, is a masterpiece of tracking an Eisensteinian editing), makes “Kagemusha”, all 180 minutes of it, a sumptuous visual feast.
Akira Kurosawa was a director who wore many hats- humanist, structuralist, classicist, and controlling auteur. A Kurosawa film is unlike anything else, much like his most famous contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, his is a style unmistakable against fellow directors, and his legacy seems assured, despite the rocky ‘70’s, and a decline in quality, post-“Ran”. If “Kagemusha” was just a warm up to “King Lear”, than it is one beauty of an opening act; a masterpiece in its own right, part pageantry, part painting, part stage theatrics, and part emotional retribution. When the double is caught, and the Takeda clan seems like they are about to self-destruct, one general sums it up: “The play is over.” For Kurosawa, “Kagemusha” was hardly an end, yet a rejuvenated second act, after a lengthy intermission, in an otherwise perfectly written legacy as Japan’s cinematic giant.
“Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior” has been released on DVD by The Criterion Collection with a 40-minute documentary, interviews with Coppola and Lucas, an impressive 45-page booklet featuring Kurosawa’s original paintings, an a feature length commentary by scholar, and frequent Criterion collaborator Stephen Prince.
by Adam Suraf